


An Honest Proposal

by paperiuni



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Background Clary Fray, Background Clary Fray/Isabelle Lightwood, Background Isabelle Lightwood, Domestic, Fluff, Future Fic, M/M, Marriage Discussion, Marriage customs, Significant Handholding, Tea, Vignette, a spot of angst, a very small one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-12
Updated: 2018-09-12
Packaged: 2019-07-11 13:55:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15973703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: "You ever think about it?" Alec had draped himself over two thirds of the couch, one long shin hanging over the edge. "Marriage.""That sounds like a loaded inquiry, my dear," Magnus said. "Not much lately. But I have, on occasion, in my time."In which an incoming proposal in the family leads to a conversation between Magnus and Alec on the meaning of marriage to them both, alone and together.





	An Honest Proposal

**Author's Note:**

> This is the proposal/marriage discussion fic I wanted but hadn't yet seen, so I had to write it. With established Clary x Izzy in the background because I can, though they're more an enabling note this time.
> 
> Also, hi, I'm not dead, I'm working on the WIP(s) and this is just something short and sweet to break the long drought.
> 
> Many thanks to Agathe for giving this a lookover!

Magnus and his light evening reading had settled comfortably against Alec's shoulder on the couch, when Alec's phone went off on the coffee table. Alec shrugged off his sheaf of reports, and, much more gently, Magnus, and scrabbled for the phone. Once on his feet, he circled vaguely toward the study for some privacy.

So much for a night of blessedly uneventful domesticity. Magnus indulged himself with a vision of modifying his wards to block incoming calls after certain hours. No doubt it was an Institute officer with a tale of woe, or worse, an Alicante representative with no concept of time zones.

"You want to _what_ , Fray?" said Alec then, in tones unbecoming of the Head of the Institute. "First of all, why don't you ask her? Yeah, sure, closest male relative, but if she thought _I_ even thought about speaking for her, she'd hang me from the ceiling of the training hall."

The bright, distorted echo coming from the phone sounded very much like Clary laughing. Alec snorted amiably but spoke soberly. "You mean a mundane kind of thing. Probably the only one you could get."

Clary said something, and Magnus took the opportunity to prop his elbows on the back of the couch. Alec had stopped beside the bookshelf, the fingers of one hand kneading the nape of his neck. He stood a little hunched, humming at Clary.

"You know, it's gonna be the party Izzy cares about," he said. "Not what her brother thinks." He caught sight of Magnus and made a face, somewhere between budding happiness and a call for help.

Magnus crooked his mouth. "Tell Biscuit that if she's about to wed Isabelle and I don't get to plan the party, getting hung from the ceiling will seem a kind fate."

Alec relayed the message, to more giggling through the receiver. "She says you're on."

"Marvelous," Magnus said, and excused himself to the kitchen after the whistling tea kettle.

The leaves waiting in the pot released their soft aroma as he poured the water. Alec had put the mugs on the wrong shelf again—after four years, getting him to learn the importance of order in a warlock's kitchen still seemed a Sisyphean task—so Magnus had to dive into the cupboard after them.

At least Alec hadn't been called away by some demonic emergency or impending political disaster. He and the New York Institute had a name for themselves in Idris now, in terms of both glory and infamy. Clary's newest plan would do nothing to dim it.

"Whiskey?" Alec said, very audibly. "Fine. Tomorrow evening?"

"She's also free to consult me on the brand." Magnus floated the tea tray onto the coffee table mostly to amuse himself. It alighted with a chime of spoons and a cloud of steam.

Alec dropped onto the couch in an inelegant tumble of limbs and stared at the ceiling for a focused five seconds.

"Clary Fairchild wants to marry my sister."

"I gathered as much." Magnus poured the tea and debated adding an early dash of whiskey to Alec's. "She has been dating her for over three years. That seems a reasonable trial period, no?"

"I guess," Alec said. "I don't really know. Shadowhunter engagements tend to be pretty short. But she's got this idea of a—a mundane marriage, and that could work. We all have mundane IDs. Better than marching to Alicante with the idea and half the Council dropping dead from the shock."

" _There_ is an proposition." Magnus suffered Alec's glower at that, though it was all for the sake of form. Alec did still spend a healthy percentage of his time undermining the Clave's rules in whatever matters he could. "It might clear seats for more progressive minds."

Alec sank into a fugue of tea and contemplation, so Magnus folded himself back into his corner of the couch and his book of poetry. As much as things had changed and opened up in the Institute, Alec's evident confusion didn't surprise him. It was one thing to think of himself as someone who'd broken the norm and asserted his right to love a man; another to see his sister come to terms with the fact that she loved regardless of gender. Yet a third to imagine what _other_ freedoms he could and should claim. He was still feeling his way out of the cage the Clave would've preferred him to stay in.

The necessity of that angered Magnus even as every step Alec took made him proud. It would always be so, he supposed.

"You ever think about it?" Alec had draped himself over two thirds of the couch, one long shin hanging over the edge. "Marriage."

"That sounds like a loaded inquiry, my dear," Magnus said. "Not much lately. But I have, on occasion, in my time."

"I thought we agreed you weren't gonna pull the _I'm older than this city_ thing when I ask you honest questions."

They had. Several times over. Magnus sighed softly. "I think Clary wants to make Isabelle happy. She was raised among mortals. To her, it's a promise of love and commitment. It shows to the world that she means to keep your sister. Shadowhunter tradition doesn't enter into it."

"Yeah, I think so too. I wouldn't exactly let her come over with a bottle of whiskey to ask my permission—that's apparently a _thing_ —if I didn't." Alec sounded suspiciously more amused than his flopped posture suggested. "That wasn't what I asked."

Magnus lowered his book and considered Alec there, in the space where he'd belonged for years now. In the beginning, Magnus had had his misgivings and his cherished routines, and Alec perhaps too much youthful eagerness. Experience and time together had tempered that, but not his blunt, heartfelt approach.

"As it happens, I _was_ married once." Magnus raised a finger to forestall the questions that pinched Alec's eyebrows. "To a shrewd and charming lady who needed to secure her inheritance. After a year or so, we faked my tragic death and she went her way a respectable widow with a decent fortune, of which she graciously cut me share."

Alec kicked him in the thigh, groaning and laughing at once. "God. Try to get a single straight answer out of you."

"It's an excellent story, if I say so myself." Resting a hand on Alec's knee, Magnus leaned toward him.

"So, technically, you lied to me. When you said you'd never been married. Back when I was gonna marry Lydia."

"Sometimes your memory's too sharp for your own good." It was a comfortable conversation, hemmed in familiarity, and yet Magnus's heart beat more heavily. "It wasn't precisely a time for anecdotes from my illustrious past."

"I just try to pay attention when you talk."

Magnus tilted deeper into Alec's space, against his raised leg, an errant hand on his stomach in a thoughtless configuration of closeness. "A straight answer, then. I haven't thought about marriage much, because it hasn't mattered to me. My people don't really have the tradition: when _death do us part_ might never come, either you stay together out of your own desire, or there isn't a vow strong enough to bind you forever."

There were dark waters under his words now. Alec mulled that over.

"You've had mortal lovers before, though." It was all he said, allowing Magnus to either continue or leave it.

"I have." He spread his fingers tight to the shape of Alec's side, warm through his shirt. "But even when I loved them truly, and they loved me the same, I..." He paused. "Tell me something, Alexander. When you say 'marriage', what exactly do you mean?"

Alec's expression told him his question had hit its mark. "That's the problem, right? I was always told that we had a duty to the family, that we had to carry ourselves with honor and dignity and all that. Marriage was just another kind of alliance. You know, lineage, prestige, angel-given mission."

"Or continuity, bloodline, inheritance. So many words that have nothing to do with love." Magnus shifted to let Alec lay his leg over his lap and dug his own shoulders into the couch, trying to unknot a tension nestled between them. "In this sense, much of the mundane world has overtaken the nephilim."

Alec made a pensive noise, like he would when he was sinking into a new idea. Of course he'd known the society that surrounded his own hidden world lived by different rules. The thought that they could apply to him, too—that was untrod ground.

In this, Magnus realized, he and Alec were the same.

"Those lovers you mentioned," he said, and Alec looked up at him. "All of them are more than a century in the past now. The relationships I had with them—they had nothing to do with marriage as it was understood then. When they were men, no mundane law would've permitted it. Even when they were women, wedding them would've set me above them in ways I never wanted."

Maybe it was selfish of him to seek Alec's hand as he spoke, a sign of some weakness that vocalizing this old, convoluted truth made his throat tighten. Alec took his hand and held it fast, their fingers tangled together.

"That makes sense." Alec was quiet for a while, the weight of his limbs and his hand a calming, grounding thing. "Before I met you, I used to think I'd marry eventually. Sometimes I'd hope it'd be somebody I at least liked. My parents married for love—or at least Mom did—but they were kind of an exception. That wasn't a requirement."

"It's always so cheery when you talk about nephilim customs. Oh, some people may bind themselves to someone they'd be happy with, but usually by accident. Also, that's considered slightly morally dubious."

"Like it's cheery when you talk about history," Alec said mellowly. "At least Shadowhunter marriages are between legally equal partners."

He pressed Magnus's hand and let go, twisting himself out of the couch to reach for his mug. Magnus breathed in through the filmy phantoms of the past that had clustered in the room. The smell of cinnamon from the tea. The outline of Alec's mussed, close-shorn hair, short for the summer, glossed by the light of a lamp behind him. The delicate geography of bones and veins on the back of his hand, curled around the mug.

It helped him, often, to look at Alec, to remind himself that he was present, in both senses of the word. Here and now.

Magnus took up his discarded book and stared unseeing at the words of some master poet of the Tang Dynasty, writing of bitter partings and long-suffering love, unaware that his verses had endured for a millennium and more.

It wasn't that he'd never met anyone worthy of a lifelong union, even if measured in their life rather than his own.

In his youth, Magnus had quickly dismissed matrimony as a shackle he had no need to bear: he had other ways to secure wealth for himself, could never father children, and had no need for heirs. He'd rather met people as themselves, as equals, as individuals, unhampered by the chains of societal expectation. It had been a more free and precarious way.

He wasn't blind to what marriage meant to people now; he lived closer to mortals than most Shadowhunters did. The blind spot had perhaps been himself. In all his quiet longing for love, he hadn't even pictured the possibility.

The tea had cooled on the table. He pushed magical heat from his palms into the mug until it steamed again.

Alec sank deeper into the couch, his work abandoned. Touching a forefinger to Magnus's left hand, he trailed over the contours of his rings, lingered on the bare fourth finger.

"I never asked. Do _you_ actually exist in the mundane world?"

"In several versions. It's convenient at times."

Alec glanced at him with such wry and unguarded affection that Magnus's heart hurt a little. "Okay. I'm not saying _now_ —one bombshell at a time, you know, I can't steal Izzy's show, there's Mom to consider, and Luke, and everybody at the Institute, but..."

A stupefied chuckle welled from Magnus's throat, more a gasp than a real laugh.

"You wouldn't want to march into Alicante and stun everyone with the sheer boggling temerity of this plan?" Something bloomed like a bruise behind his ribs. Oh, he knew Alec loved him. He'd let himself envision a life that twined them together, one he was already living, day to day. It wasn't that.

"Maybe." They looked at each other, sideways, as if full eye contact were too tender to bear. "I mean, it is a proposition. But mostly I want you. Isn't that the point?"

"Alexander," Magnus said, "you have me. Always."

Alec hooked his finger through Magnus's, like interlocked links. "And if, someday, we want to tell the rest of the world?"

There it was. Magnus had had no use for oaths that'd set him over someone, that'd tie him to lands and names and properties. He was, willing or unwilling, his own continuity. It bore no thinking about right now.

What did, instead, was Alec's careful touch, the way his body and voice curved, tense with hope, toward Magnus. It was a question, silent, from the heart. He'd agreed to answer.

"Then we do," he said. "I will. Of course I will."

*

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are adored and feed the muse. ♥
> 
> I'm on tumblr @ [poemsfromthealley](http://poemsfromthealley.tumblr.com)!


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